‘Let’s Kill the Baby’

Editors' note (updated July 10, 2008): The New York Times, which first reported on the mother and child on June 26 (prior to NEWSWEEK), printed an editors' note on July 9 stating that medical workers subsequently discovered that the baby did not suffer broken bones in an attack, but rather had a preexisting condition, club feet. The Times says "the mother subsequently admitted that she had exaggerated injuries" the baby sustained during an attack by youths backing Robert Mugabe.

NEWSWEEK's correspondent Rod Nordland, who reported from inside Zimbabwe for two weeks, is no longer in the country, but after further investigation has concluded that the mother's account was either untrue or exaggerated. He writes: "Recently someone claiming to be the doctor who treated the baby Delani called me, and said that the baby's deformed ankles were the result of club foot, a congenital condition, not due to any recent trauma. As a result, a NEWSWEEK reporter visited the hometown of the mother, Loveness, to check out her story.  Neighbors confirmed that her daughter indeed did suffer from club feet from birth. None of the neighbors were aware of an attack on her home, which has not been destroyed, although the town, Epworth, has been the scene of frequent attacks on opposition politicians and supporters. We were unable to reach Loveness again to discuss this. There is no evidence that any attack took place on the baby, and while the mother appeared credible when I interviewed her, and had no financial or other apparent motive in lying, it now appears that her account was untrue or, at best, greatly exaggerated. Since foreign journalists are barred from Zimbabwe, and also forbidden by hospital officials to enter the hospital where the child was treated, it was not possible to check out her story more thoroughly at the time. I regret the mistake."

For five days, I've been looking everywhere for Blessing Mabhena, ever since I read newspaper reports about the child, a cute little one-year-old baby with big eyes and two stumpy little legs in casts, who had suffered the wrath of ruling party thugs who couldn't find the infant's parents. The baby could easily, I thought, be the poster child for this entire vicious election process and the waning years of Comrade Bob.

Finally, on Wednesday night, I found Blessing. The search itself was illuminating. Anywhere else, tracking down a horror story of this sort would be Journalism 101—a few phone calls and bingo, two or three degrees of separation at most. People want to get stories like this out, and especially where there's a big, organized opposition, they do get out. Not in this case, though. It's possible of course to talk to activists with the Movement for Democratic Change, the opposition party, but for the most part they're no longer coming to their offices, so they're scattered around town, hiding out in their homes or in the homes of friends.

And they're often on the run. About 250 MDC activists and their families, including many children and mothers with babies on their backs, camped out on the sidewalk in front of the U.S. embassy here in Harare on Thursday. Most in the group said they had been chased by police from their refuge in the MDC headquarters building. Many have casts or show others signs of having been recently injured. "We're tired, hungry and we have no place to go," said one man who provided only his first name, Simba. "Our homes have been burned out, our villages have been burned out. And if we go back, they say they are going to beat us again." A U.S. embassy spokesman said they have been getting refugees all week in smaller numbers, which they have referred to safehouses. But they're now running out of places to send people.

All of this makes it hard for anti-Mugabe forces to organize, and difficult to exchange information. And the climate of fear just breeds more fear, so even after we did found MDC folks who knew about the case of the injured baby, they weren't willing to tell us where the child and mother were.

Human rights groups, of which there are several, were not much help either. At the ZimRights Association on Fourth Street, they'd never heard of the case, and were so atremble at a visit from a foreign journalist that I'm not sure they would have said if they did know. Over at the offices of the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, up on the eighth floor of Harare's pre-eminent office building, the Eastgate, I didn't even get that far. The doors were padlocked even though it was office hours, but a voice came over the intercom. I told them who I was and they said they'd come out presently, but after a quarter of an hour, it seemed as likely that they were summoning the authorities as trying to figure out whether to talk to a journalist, and so finally I left.

Then I found a human rights activist working from her home who at first said she knew where the baby was. She told me just to call back after she checked with the family and her protectors, who are watching after them in their hiding place. Then I called later and she no longer knew where the baby was, but the protectors were in a meeting—all day. Finally, she said she didn't know where Blessing was, and suggested I try the hospitals. Which of course, I had, long before.

How I finally found the little girl I can't say, without putting someone at risk, but suffice it to say she was in a compound surrounded with high walls where there were a couple dozen families, all of them displaced by the election violence, and still too afraid to return to their homes. Among the displaced people was a woman in her late 20s named Loveness (she asked that I not use her last name), and her daughter, the baby in question. She had been released from the hospital the day before. Turned out the child's name was not Blessing Mabhena—that was the name of a nurse who had cared for her—but rather Delani, 1 year old. But the story essentially checked out.